Acleacius, yeah, it's surprising that those cards can't run the game faster, but it is no trickery on our part. Every texture has a few different maps on it (bump map, spec map, color map, etc), and cards that aren't very modern just can't chug through that many pixel shaders. Believe me, I was sad to learn my home machine wasn't even fast enough to run dx9.

If you increase the resolution on a game and the framerate dies, you are framebuffer bound. That's not really an engine issue (well aside from the engine using lots of pixel shaders), that's just your card chugging.

I apologize if I misunderstood you earlier. It does look like we're choosing resolutions for people that are 1024 and lower, but there are some newer cards that can handle higher resolutions. It's just a question of prettiness versus resolution, and obviously our balance of the two wasn't a good match for your tastes. Did you try turning off zfeather, shadows, etc?